Watching Elizabeth’s journey this season has been captivating. We meet the female half of our KGB spy duo as a woman devoted to the cause of Mother Russia. She never questioned instructions and handled every mission with precision.

But as the season has progressed, Gregory’s fear last week has permeated her tough exterior: she’s gone a little soft. Not so soft that she won’t, say, beat a suspect with a towel dispenser and verbally torture him about his final minutes of life. But soft enough that she will let that suspect go because she knows he’s not the real enemy.

It’s that realization about herself and the job she’s been sent to do that change her relationship with the only two people who know who she really is: Claudia and Philip.

Claudia is a trip. I can’t figure out if she’s pure evil or if she really does feel like some sort of kindred spirit to Elizabeth. She seemed, a little too easily, to forgive Elizabeth for bashing in her face. But she also likes Elizabeth more than Philip. It could be because of their shared lives as KGB women. It could also be, as Elizabeth noted, a sense of jealousy. Elizabeth and Philip are very good at their jobs. Moscow seems to rely on them heavily to carry out tasks. And Claudia knows that Elizabeth will follow through with any mission given her.

It’s that trait that Claudia preys upon, giving Elizabeth information on the man who ordered the death of her mentor, General Zhukov. Claudia, however, tells her that she’s not to retaliate because Moscow is in a cooling off period. Basically, Claudia is poking the bear, taunting her agent into action. She knows Elizabeth’s soft spot for Zhukov. But did she taunt her to avenge her former lover, or to get Elizabeth back in check?

Either way, Elizabeth takes the bait, but not before conferring with Philip because she needs his help. He’s come through for her before when he killed the man who raped her as a trainee. Philip is hesitant because they just escaped hot water over Amador’s death and allowing Gregory to perform his “street theater.” However, he relents when he realizes Elizabeth is bull-headed enough to go through with her plan on her own. Elizabeth picks up the CIA agent in bar and entices him with the best/worst pick-up line ever. “What is a four-letter slang word that finishes the sentence “Do you wanna ___?” So awesomely tacky.

She gets him in the bathroom and tries to inject him from a syringe, but he catches on. A good fight breaks out, but our tiny super-spy still takes him down with the aforementioned towel dispenser. She and Philip take him to some warehouse that looks different from the one Amador died in. But where Claudia decided to use tacit implications to get Elizabeth to go after the CIA agent, the agent preys upon her feeling of emptiness. “You have no heart, no soul, no conscience,” he spits at his captor. “Do you care about anything? Do you love anyone?”

The agent realizes they’re somewhat in the same boat: he’s passing down orders given to him and she’s following through on orders being given to her. Until this point, I don’t think Elizabeth saw herself as a pawn but more as a participant in the greater good for Russia. Deciding not to kill the agent brings on a flood of emotions and she breaks down in sobs. “I was out of control,” she tells Philip.

It was her lack of emotional control that scared her. Zhukov tells her in a flashback that she was chosen because of her fear to surrender. “Not everyone is your enemy,” Zhukov says. Until this point, she’s been able to keep personal and professional separate. But it’s the agent’s words that echo Zhukov about her lack of emotion that make her realize all she’s lost: Gregory is gone; Zhukov has been assassinated. The only person left is Philip, who had played his roles well as both dutiful husband and spy partner.

This realization comes to fore when she comes to his pathetic motel room with “thanks-a-lot” beer. Philip has already packed up his stuff, saying he can’t bring the kids there anymore because it’s too depressing. Elizabeth lights up at the thought of Philip coming home, but that light fades when he says he’s moving into an apartment. Elizabeth still can’t fully surrender herself and be vulnerable with Philip, even to tell him he should come home as she did once before.

Side thoughts:

* I loved Sandra and Elizabeth’s girls night out, even if it ended in Sandra calling out Stan Trudy Campbell style. Stan, home late again from work, is dumbfounded when Sandra lets him have it for cheating. Her drunken rant to him about his own emptiness foreshadowed the nothingness that Elizabeth would contend with throughout the episode. The Beemans’ marriage still isn’t resolved, but we know it’s going nowhere fast.

* The flashbacks on this show can be hit or miss. But the ones examining Elizabeth’s relationship with Zhukov were revelatory. We’ve seen her softer side with Gregory, but with Zhukov as a father figure/Yoda, we get to see her interact with a man on a level of pure respect. She valued his advice, even if she didn’t always take it. And he loved her in a way that only made her better.

* I’ve talked often about how the Jenningses’ marriage pales in comparison to their spy partnership. But what if the marriage was the key piece to them working so well together? Since they’ve “hit the pause button,” they’ve had mistake after mistake: Amador’s death and Gregory’s “street theater” being the biggest. Maybe the ingrained trust that comes with marriage is what keeps them on track.

* Beeman has fully embraced his Casanova side. Who was he trying to convince when he told Nina that ending their affair was the right thing to do? Nina, going full femme fatale, tells him that she understands then dresses seductively in front of him. Doing the right thing gets thrown out the window. But what of Nina throwing her new duties in his face? She now has access to the secret recordings from the defense secretary’s home. Could Beeman’s murder of Vlad be mentioned there?

* Now the FBI knows that a man and a woman, possibly a couple, are working together in the U.S. as KGB agents. Beeman’s spidey senses were tingling when he heard that. Could he be circling back to his original suspicions about the Jenningses?

* This latest standoff between Elizabeth and Claudia has loads of promise. Whether Claudia actually had an affair with Zhukov is irrelevant. Elizabeth knows that Claudia is using her to get what she wants, whether Moscow orders it or not. Claudia is definitely sly, but does her devotion to Russia trump her need to get Elizabeth to tow the line?

So what’s next? Will Philip be having more meals with Martha’s parents? Will Matthew continue to wear makeup to freak out his dad? Will the music department continue to pull out great songs, like Pete Townshend’s “Rough Boys?” Did you realize that Paige and Henry would be in their mid-40s by now?

About Speakeasy

Speakeasy is a blog covering media, entertainment, celebrity and the arts. The publication is produced by Barbara Chai and Jonathan Welsh with contributions from the Wall Street Journal staff and others. Write to us at speakeasy@wsj.com or follow us on Twitter at @WSJSpeakeasy or individually @barbarachai.